Delete index.dat files

What are the Index.dat files?

The Index.dat files are used by Internet Explorer and Windows to store history, Internet cache, cookies,
UserData records and other information about your PC activities. If the information is too big to fit in the
index.dat files themselves, it is placed in external files and the index.dat file serves as index or table of
contents, which helps the Internet Explorer to find the full information.

Although some of their functions are useful, they are dangerous privacy threat - any person with even little
knowledge about index.dat files locations and structure can see history of almost all of your
computer activities. Index.dat files are not the only privacy threat but they are the most obscure and dangerous one because they
are hard to find and even harder to delete. In fact, in most cases it is impossible to delete Index.dat files manually
because Windows keeps them open all the time.

You can use Mil Shield to
clean the content of index.dat files along with history, cookies, cache and many other tracks. If you want to know more
about index.dat files and want to locate them and try to delete them manually read the next chapters of this
article.

Index.dat files are used
for the first time in Internet Explorer 4 and since then they are part of Internet Explorer. Before
version 4 of Internet Explorer there were mm256.dat and mm2048.dat files, which are similar to
Index.dat files.

Where are Index.dat files located?

In many cases you can not see or find an index.dat file using
Windows Explorer. There is a little text file called desktop.ini in each directory where index.dat file
is located. This file forces Windows Explorer to hide the index.dat files and to show the contents of
Internet cache or history instead. However you
can use some other file utilities and binary (hex) editor to find the files and view their content.
The location of index.dat files depends on the version of Windows:

For Windows 7 and Windows Vista:

If you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista then index.dat files are in these locations
(note that on your PC they can be on other drive instead of drive C):

Note that on your computer the Windows directory may not be C:\Windows but some other directory.
If you don't have Profiles directory in you Windows directory don't worry - this just means that
you are not using user profiles. It is also possible that you don't have UserData subdirectories.
To learn more about UserData records click here.

You can use Mil Shield to
clean the content of index.dat files along with history, cookies, cache and many other tracks.

What is in the Index.dat files?

As already mentioned, the index.dat files are binary files. Their content can be seen only
with binary (hex) editor. We will examine an index.dat file from the Temporary Internet Files (Internet Explorer cache). First, let's take a look to the index.dat file header:

Actually the index.dat header is much larger but this is the most important part of it.
The first thing is the version of the index.dat file (Client UrlCache MMF Ver 4.7) - this
particular file is from Internet Explorer version 4 but the index.dat file format is very similar in Internet Explorer
5, 6, 7 and 8.

The next important thing in the header are the names of the four subfolders in which
the cached files from the Internet are located (they are not present in the headers of the index.dat files
for cookies and history). These subfolders
are located in the same folder as the index.dat file and in this case their names are
49EDE5UVC, GHIZ8LMVB, EBWNUZWLB and G48NSH4S. On your PC these
folders can be more than four (depending on the size of the index.dat file) and their names
will be different.

The real content of the index.dat files usually starts at byte offset 4000h or 5000h from
the beginning of the file. The index.dat file is composed of many records of four different types:
HASH, URL, LEAK and REDR.

HASH records are the largest but
they don't contain any private information. They are just hash indexes of the contents
of the index.dat file. If the file is larger there can be many such records.

The vast majority of the index.dat records are of types URL, LEAK and REDR.
They have fairly similar layout. Look at this sample URL record.

As you can see there is a lot of information here. First, there is encoded date and time
of the loading of this picture (icon_hardware.gif) from the Internet. The date and
time are encoded in binary format in the second row of the hex dump. Next, there is
http://www.aceshardware.com/site/images/icon_hardware.gif, which is the full URL
of the loaded file. The
name of the local copy of the file (which is in one of the four subfolders of the index.dat
folder) is icon_hardware.gif. The next thing is the full HTTP header of the response of the Web
server:

The last but not least bit of information in the record is the name of the user account: Administrator. Obviously all
this information can be potentially dangerous because it tells us who and when accessed given Internet page and
what was the response of the Web server. If you clean the Internet cache (Temporary Internet Files) then
the local copies of the cached files are deleted but most of the index.dat file records are left almost untouched. The same
is true for the history and cookies.

The empty space of index.dat files is filled with junk (most often zeros but it can also be various meaningless sequences) or in some areas - with
"magic" sequence 0BADF00Dh (BAD FOOD). Obviously Microsoft developers are not without a sense of
humor. BAD FOOD parts of the file are deleted records and they aren't a privacy threat.

You can use Mil Shield to clean the content of index.dat files along with history,
cookies, cache and many other tracks.

How to erase or clean Index.dat files?

Erasing or cleaning of the index.dat files is not an easy task because they are opened by
Internet Explorer and Windows all the time. If you are using an ancient Windows Me, Windows 98 or Windows 95
system, you can restart in DOS mode and then you can delete index.dat files one by one (look in the
folders that are mentioned above). However if you are using Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2000 or NT this won't work.

Mil Shield is a powerful privacy protection program that was designed specifically to clean
and shred the index.dat files content. Unlike the other methods of dealing with index.dat file content, shredding is the best
because it doesn't destroy the entire structure of the index.dat file which can cause Internet Explorer or Windows to crash but instead
cleans and shreds only the privacy threatening URL, LEAK and REDR records. Additional benefit is the ability to preserve the tracks from
some chosen by you sites (selective cleaning), which makes your browsing more comfortable and safe (it is rather suspicious to always have
empty history, cookies and cache - it is better to leave some tracks from "innocent" sites). Mil Shield also cleans all other tracks as cookies, history,
cache, AutoComplete records, UserData records, history of recently used folders and documents and
many others.